(TEXAS) — Texas legislators are heading into their third special session Monday with several controversial topics on the agenda, including transgender student participation in sports and gender-affirming health care for trans youth.
Lawmakers will consider banning transgender students from playing on interscholastic teams that align with their gender identity. Children in grades K through 12 would only be allowed to play sports that correspond with their sex assigned at birth or sex designated on their original birth certificate.
Texas lawmakers alone have introduced more than 40 anti-trans bills this year.
At least 30 states across the country have introduced similar bills on trans student-athletes. So far, eight states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Dakota and West Virginia — have passed the bills into laws or signed them as executive orders.
The laws are being challenged in Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee and West Virginia.
Some groups in support of the bills, like the conservative Christian group Concerned Women for America, claim that trans girls have an unfair advantage.
“The issue is about the basic fairness and opportunities that women have fought for centuries to obtain,” the group said in a statement to ABC News. “The disparity comes when forcing women to compete against a biological male that has innate biological differences, giving them physical advantages that simply cannot be erased.”
There is no evidence that trans athletes disproportionately dominate sports when playing on teams that correspond with their gender identity. There is also no evidence that they have an advantage.
Other anti-trans bills on the special session docket include bans on gender-affirming therapy, counseling, surgery or health care. In some cases, allowing a child or teen under the age of 18 gender-affirming health care may be considered child abuse, if HB22 is signed into law.
LGBTQ+ advocates say these bills only serve to tarnish the mental health and safety of trans students.
“Like any other student, trans young people just want to stay healthy, go to school and spend time with their friends and loved ones,” Andy Marra, the executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, told ABC News. “For transgender students living in states where their very lives are under attack, it can be near impossible to focus on much else but surviving.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that discrimination can lead to poor mental health, suicide, substance abuse, violence and other health risks for trans youth.
Young transgender students are also three times more likely to attempt suicide than their cisgender peers, the CDC reported.
(MOSCOW) — Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, which backs President Vladimir Putin, has kept its supermajority in the country’s parliament, sweeping elections that were marred with allegations of widespread ballot rigging and saw many of the Kremlin’s top opponents barred from running.
With virtually all ballots counted, Russia’s election’s commission said United Russia had taken nearly 50% of the vote and won nearly 90% of first-past-the-post districts, meaning the party will retain its two-thirds majority in the lower house of parliament, which allows it to change Russia’s constitution.
Russia’s elections are closely managed, and the pro-Kremlin party’s victory was seen as a foregone conclusion, but on Monday, opposition parties accused the Kremlin of using blatant fabrication to inflate the result and produce an overwhelming win even in Moscow, usually a center of dissent.
After polls closed Sunday night after three days of voting, early partial results showed several opposition parties and politicians making strong showings in the capital, with some seemingly in reach of victory with most votes counted.
But those results were all wiped out when, after many hours, authorities published results from online voting, which handed victories to pro-Kremlin candidates. Opposition parties, even those from the so-called “loyal opposition,” cried foul, accusing the Kremlin of using the online votes to conceal vote manipulation and steal victory for its candidates.
The Communist Party, which largely acts as a tame opposition in the parliament, said it would not recognize the results in Moscow, where six of its candidates lost out once the online votes were added.
Critics started raising suspicions about Moscow’s online count after it took far longer for it to be completed than the paper ballot count for most of the rest of the country — a sign, critics said, that officials were waiting to see how much they needed to alter the vote. The online voting was in effect a black box, with independent monitors unable to observe it or properly check how the results were signed off on by officials, independent monitors said. Workers at state companies and organizations have also reported being pressed by their managers to vote online en masse.
Several candidates called a protest at Moscow’s Pushkin Square on Monday. A few hundred people gathered under heavy rain to demonstrate, watched by a cordon of riot police.
“Such a giant difference between the results at the ‘live’ polling stations and the online vote can’t be true,” Mikhail Lobanov, a Communist candidate with wide support among liberal voters, told the crowd, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Lobanov said he had been on track to beat Yevgeny Popov, a pro-Kremlin TV personality, by a margin of 10,500 votes before the online votes suddenly gave Popov a lead of 20,000 votes at the last moment.
There were also allegations of widespread analogue ballot rigging around Russia. Throughout the weekend, there was a stream of videos seeming to show elections officials stuffing wads of ballots into voting urns or trying to block monitoring cameras while others did so.
Independent researchers also spotted that Russia’s central elections committee now encrypts the results data published on its website, a step reportedly intended to prevent researchers from crunching the data themselves, which in the past has allowed them to identify signs of rigging.
“Online voting represents right now represents an absolute evil — a black box that no one checks,” Sergey Shpilkin, a data scientist who in the past has used statistical analysis to demonstrate likely falsification in Russian elections, told Russian news website Meduza.
The head of Russia’s elections commission Ella Pamfilova in a video meeting with Putin said the elections had seen far fewer violations than usual and claimed Russia’s system was “one of the most transparent” in the world.
The United States and some European countries criticized the elections as unfair amid the Kremlin’s use of repressive laws to prevent opponents from participating. Ned Price, the U.S. State Department’s spokesperson, in a statement said the Russian government had conducted “widespread efforts to marginalize independent political figures” and had “severely restricted political pluralism and prevented the Russian people from exercising their civil and political rights.”
United Russia took nearly 50% of the vote despite polls suggesting its support was around 30%, as high food prices and unpopular pension reforms have eaten into its popularity. Ahead of the elections, the Kremlin launched a campaign of repression on a scale unprecedented under Putin’s 20 year-rule, barring dozens of opposition candidates from running, with many arrested and some forced abroad.
It dismantled the movement of its fiercest critic Alexey Navalny, who was jailed in January after surviving a nerve agent poisoning last year.
Navalny, from jail, had sought to exploit the Kremlin party’s unpopularity at the elections with a tactical voting campaign called “Smart Voting,” advising people to vote for any candidate with the best chance of beating United Russia.
On Monday, he claimed the campaign had worked, arguing the campaign’s recommended candidates had won 12 out of Moscow’s 15 districts before the online votes were added.
(NEW YORK) — More than a century ago, the globe was left devastated by a pandemic that has been described by experts as “the deadliest in human history.”
The 1918 influenza pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, equivalent in proportion to 200 million in today’s global population. An estimated 675,000 of those deaths occurred in the United States.
Now, 18 months into the coronavirus pandemic, the virus has claimed more American lives than its counterpart a hundred years ago.
At this point, at least 675,446 Americans have been confirmed to have died since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, with thousands of Americans lives still being lost each day.
Surpassing the 1918 death toll is a dismal milestone, but experts suggest there are key differences between both pandemics that must be taken into account, given modern day access to better medical treatments and vaccinations.
“These are two different viruses, two different times in history, at two different times of medical history, with what you have available to combat or treat it,” Howard Markel, professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan, told ABC News.
The influenza outbreak of 1918 began in the spring, with the novel H1N1 virus passing from birds to humans, and lasted for approximately two years. Approximately one-third of the world’s population at that time, or 500 million people, was ultimately estimated to have been infected, according to the CDC.
According to experts, it is important to recall, when comparing data from the two pandemics, that the numbers of deaths stemming from the 1918 pandemic are just estimates. In fact, according to Dr. Graham Mooney, assistant professor of the history of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, it is likely that these figures were significantly underestimated, because of non-registration, missing records, misdiagnosis or underreporting.
Likewise, experts believe that the current COVID-19 death count could already be greatly undercounted, due to inconsistent reporting by states and localities, and the exclusion of excess deaths.
In comparing the pandemics, Markel said, it is important to remember that we now have many more people living in the U.S. than in 1918, when the population stood at approximately 105 million, according to census data, compared to 328 million people in 2019.
The U.S. currently has a coronavirus case fatality rate of 1.6%, compared to the 2.5% fatality rate for influenza in 1918, noted Mooney. Normally, the flu’s fatality rate is less than 0.1%. And thus, the rate of death in the United States, due to COVID-19, remains significantly below the one attributed to the 1918 pandemic.
Ultimately, when compared on a per-capita basis, the pandemic of 1918 was far deadlier than this one, according to Christopher McKnight Nichols, associate professor of history at Oregon State University.
“The difference is that 1 in 500 Americans have died now, and about 1 in 152 died in 1918, although our number keeps going up,” Nichols told ABC News.
Vaccinations and traditional intervention methods key to protection
Although the two pandemics were at first comparable, the introduction of the coronavirus vaccine made the differences between the two “stark,” said Nichols.
“People were desperate for treatment measures in 1918. People were desperate for a vaccine,” Nichols said. “We have effective vaccines now, and so what strikes me in the comparison, if you think about this milestone, this tragedy of deaths, is that same number but we have a really effective treatment, the thing that they most wanted in 1918 and ’19, we’ve got. And for a lot of different reasons, we botched the response.”
Similar to the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, no vaccines or treatments were available to protect people against the 1918 influenza. Thus, protection through non-pharmaceutical interventions was critical, Mooney said.
“The same kinds of measures — the so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions that were put on in 1918 — were the same that we saw last year: lockdowns, social distancing, hygiene masks, limits on gathering places,” Nichols said.
In fact, social distancing was also one of the great historical lessons learned from 1918, according to Markel, demonstrating that if done early, and for a long time, such measures can work.
Millions of different communities and demographics affected
One fundamental contrast between the two pandemics, according to Markel, is that different age groups were most significantly impacted. A disproportionate number of those who succumbed to the disease in 1918 were in the 18- to 45-year-old age group. Young children and the elderly were also significantly impacted.
However, in the coronavirus pandemic, the age group that has been the most affected is over the age of 65, who make up 78.7% of virus-related deaths.
Historical evidence suggests that racial and ethnic disparities, which have affected communities of color throughout the coronavirus pandemic, were also present during the 1918 pandemic.
Black Americans had higher case fatality rates from influenza in 1918-19 than whites, according to a 2019 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Similarly, Black Americans account for nearly 14% of COVID-19 related deaths, despite the fact that Black Americans only account for 12.5% of the population.
Becoming endemic
Domestically and globally, experts said, it will be crucial for vaccine uptake to increase, in order to blunt the impact of the coronavirus death toll.
“I’m a little pessimistic going into winter, given the fact that there’s such a large unvaccinated population that it is a lot like 1918,” Nichols said, adding that it will ultimately be “some combination of getting more of the population immune, with vaccines and with infections.”
Ultimately, although “it’s not the worst of all time, it’s pretty darn close,” Markel said of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s the worst of our lifetimes, and it’s changed our lives in so many ways.”
(WASHINGTON) — A decorated group of more than 500 current and former American women Olympians and professional and collegiate athletes is warning the U.S. Supreme Court in a new legal filing that eroding access to abortion care in America will be “devastating” to women’s athletics at all levels.
“If the state compelled women athletes to carry pregnancies to term and give birth, it could derail women’s athletic careers, academic futures, and economic livelihoods at a large scale,” the women write. “Such a fundamental restriction on bodily integrity and human autonomy would never be imposed on a male athlete, though he would be equally responsible for a pregnancy.”
Among the named signatories are U.S. soccer star Megan Rapinoe; Olympic water polo player Ashleigh Johnson; WNBA star Diana Taurasi; U.S. women’s soccer national team captain Becky Sauerbrunn; and, Layshia Clarendon, a former WNBA all-star and current vice president of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association.
The filing — known as an amicus, or friend-of-the-court, brief — was made in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a blockbuster abortion rights showdown scheduled or oral argument at the Supreme Court on Dec. 1.
The state of Mississippi has explicitly asked the court to overturn nearly 50 years of abortion rights precedent since the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, allowing states to set stringent new restrictions on early-term abortions, if not outlaw them entirely.
“As women athletes and people in sports, we must have the power to make important decisions about our own bodies and exert control over our reproductive lives,” Rapinoe said in a statement. “I am honored to stand with the hundreds of athletes who have signed onto this Supreme Court brief to help champion not only our constitutional rights, but also those of future generations of athletes.”
The signatories are all women who “have exercised, relied on the availability of, or support the constitutional right to abortion care in order to meet the demands of their sports,” according to the brief.
Women’s rights advocates said it was the first time a large group of female American athletes publicly took a stand in support of abortion access.
Crissy Perham, a double gold medalist and captain of the 1992 U.S. Olympic swim team, offered one of several personal testimonies in the brief attesting to her experience obtaining an abortion.
“When I was in college, I was on birth control, but I accidentally became pregnant,” she wrote. “I decided to have an abortion. I wasn’t ready to be a mom, and having an abortion felt like I was given a second chance at life.”
“That choice ultimately led me to being an Olympian, a college graduate and a proud mother today,” Perham wrote.
Several athletes described the importance of the Supreme Court precedent in laying the groundwork for more women to participate in athletics and as a “safeguard” in case birth control failed.
“As a victim of rape during my junior year of college, I was comforted in the fact that if I were to fall pregnant and need an abortion, I would have access to that service,” a Division I field hockey player, who was not identified by name, wrote in the brief.
Ashleigh Johnson, the first Black woman on the U.S. Olympic water polo team and member of the gold-medal 2016 and 2021 Olympic teams, said she wants the justices to see abortion access a matter of racial justice.
“It is well-established that women of color experience real disparities in accessing health care services, including contraceptive, abortion and other reproductive care,” Johnson said in a statement. “I hope we can have a real conversation as a country about valuing Black women’s autonomy.”
The case will be argued in December and is expected to be decided by the end of June 2022.
(HAWAII) — It’s been more than a week since the disappearance of 6-year-old Isabella Kalua in Waimanalo, Hawaii. The search for Isabella continues, as Honolulu police and volunteers spread across the city to find the missing child.
Isabella was last seen asleep in her room at her Puha Street address on Sunday, Sept. 12 around 9 p.m., local time, according to the Honolulu Police Department.
Her adoptive family has not participated in search crews, but their attorney told KITV that they have spoken and are cooperating with police. Since they have received death threats regarding the child’s disappearance they have not gone out to search, the attorney said.
KITV reports that HPD has acquired several items that may be linked to Isabella, including a photo album and toys found in a garbage bag, but they have yet to confirm its connection to the case.
Police are also working with the FBI to investigate her disappearance.
“We have conducted numerous interviews; however, there are still individuals, to include acquaintances and family members, who have yet to come forward to be interviewed,” HPD said in a statement to KITV.
Honolulu Police say it won’t rule out foul play.
“I don’t want to think the worst-case scenario,” Alena Kaeo, Kalua’s biological aunt told ABC-affiliate KITV. “But it is always is a possibility. Again, I’m trying to keep my faith as strong as possible and I pray — I pray hard that she is safe. I don’t want to think the worst but it is a possibility.”
Isabella is described by authorities as being a brown-eyed, brown-haired, white, and mixed-race girl. Police said Isabella was likely wearing a black hoodie, black leggings, colorful socks, and Nike slides when she went missing.
(NEW YORK) — Two people are being treated for gunshot wounds following a shooting at Heritage High School in Newport News, Virginia, according to police. Their injuries are not considered life-threatening.
Students at the high school were evacuated and sent to the tennis courts, according to the Newport News Police Department.
Police said at 11:30 a.m., they responded to a shooting call at the school. “Four, maybe five” students were sent to area hospitals. Of those, two were being treated for gunshot wounds.
The two gunshot victims are 17 years old. One male was shot in the face and a female was shot in the lower leg, police said at a press conference Monday afternoon.
Another student is being treated after falling during the chaotic scene, while another was transported for breathing issues related to asthma, police said.
No suspect is in custody, police said.
Police said they are going through footage and evidence recovered from the scene as they hunt for the suspect. Police officers said they don’t believe the suspect is a threat to other members of the community and it seems there was some type of altercation that led to the shooting, but they’re still investigating.
An official with the FBI Field Office in Norfolk, Virginia, tells ABC News they are aware and providing assistance to local authorities. The ATF said it is also assisting.
Police have not publicly released the name of the suspect or victims.
(NEW YORK) — Nearly 90 new companies — including multinational corporate giant Procter & Gamble, tech behemoth HP and cloud-computing titan Salesforce — have signed onto the Climate Pledge, an Amazon-backed initiative that asks firms to commit to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
Organizers of the Climate Pledge announced Monday a total of 86 new signatories, bringing the total number of companies involved to 201. The new commitments come as the United Nations General Assembly kicks off in New York City, with climate change talks expected to take center stage among the high-profile meeting of world leaders.
It also comes in the wake of a recent report from a U.N. panel — that U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called a “code red for humanity” — warning of dire environmental consequences if immediate action is not taken to cut back greenhouse gas emissions.
ASOS, Nespresso and Selfridges are among some of the other household names who joined the pledge Monday. Altogether, pledge signatories employ more than 7 million employees across 26 industries in 21 countries.
“I believe that now, more than ever, companies like Amazon have an obligation to lead the fight for our planet,” Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, said in a statement Monday.
“But, solving this challenge cannot be accomplished by one company; it requires all of us to act together, and it’s one of the reasons we’re so excited to announce that more than 200 businesses have joined us in signing The Climate Pledge — a commitment to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement 10 years early,” Jassy added.
David S. Taylor, Procter & Gamble’s CEO and president, echoed Jassy’s sentiments in a separate statement, saying that addressing climate change effectively, “requires collaboration across industries and credible science-based actions.”
“P&G has made significant progress over the past decade and we know we must do more,” Taylor added. “The task ahead is urgent, difficult, and much bigger than any single company can solve alone. P&G is proud to join The Climate Pledge as we work together to preserve our shared home for generations to come.”
If all of the firms followed through on their promise, they would collectively mitigate some 1.98 billion metric tons of carbon emissions by 2040, according to an estimate from initiative organizers, or 5.4% of the current global annual emissions.
The firms have committed to measuring and reporting their greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis, implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris Agreement’s goalposts, and neutralize any remaining emissions with additional and quantifiable offsets.
A report issued last month by a U.N. panel that warned that the impacts of human-caused climate change are severe and widespread — and that while there is still a chance to limit that warming, some impacts will continue to be felt for centuries.
The report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called for “immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” in order to limit future warming to 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, as is the goal of the Paris Agreement by 2050. The report also warned that unless greenhouse gas emissions are drastically reduced, the world will exceed 1.5 degrees of warming in the next 20 years.
When calling the report a “code red,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres added that, “The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse‑gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.”
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s then-CEO, announced the Climate Pledge and the company’s plan to commit to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 — a decade ahead of the international Paris Agreement — in 2019. At the time, Bezos said that if Amazon “can meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early, then any company can.”
Christiana Figueres, the U.N.’s former climate chief and now founding partner of Global Optimism — the advocacy group spearheading the Climate Pledge with Amazon — said in a statement Monday that the IPCC report is the starkest warning yet that “the window of time to act decisively is narrowing.”
“This wake-up call from science must be faced with courage and conviction,” she added. “In this light, it’s encouraging that 86 more companies — some of the largest household names in the world — are now joining The Climate Pledge, committing to accelerate their actions to tackle climate change in a timely fashion, and playing their part in building a low-carbon economy.”
The private sector has faced immense pressure from consumers and even shareholders in recent years to address climate change. “Industry” accounted for a whopping 23% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, behind only transportation (29%) and electricity production (25%) — data some advocates say highlights the need for large-scale industry changes vs. putting the onus to tackle climate change solely on individuals.
(NEW YORK) — One Arizona woman is on a mission to educate others about influential Latin women — by using her TikTok.
Fernanda Cortes, 23, immigrated to Phoenix with her family from Guadalajara, Mexico, when she was in elementary school. Growing up, to connect her to her culture, Cortes said her family made sure to teach her about influential Latinas.
“I think it wasn’t necessarily them trying to teach me history, but they’re just trying to teach me about these cultural icons that touched so many people in my culture,” Cortes said.
Like many 20-somethings, Cortes downloaded TikTok during the pandemic and began to get ideas for videos she could make. While millions of others were learning the latest dance crazes, she decided to make it a space where she could teach others about Latinas who changed the course of history.
“I just decided to start talking about these women that inspired me,” Cortes said. “I felt like they weren’t being recognized or acknowledged. … I wanted to put their names out there, their stories out there and hopefully connect with someone and have another young Latina find someone that they can see themselves in.”
Cortes began a series on her account called “Bad a— Latinas in History.” In every video Cortes highlights a different Latina and shares how she helped change the world. She began her series honoring Mexican film actress María Félix and has now highlighted nearly 100 influential Latina woman through her videos.
“I’ve talked about Rita Moreno, how she was the first Latina to win an Oscar, or Sylvia Mendez who and her and her mom helped end segregation in California, which set a precedent to end segregation in the entire country,” Cortes said. “I felt like their stories were so important. … So I wanted to put them out there and hopefully connect with someone who had never heard about them before.”
(NEW YORK) — Former President Trump’s top military adviser was “not going rogue” when he held secret phone calls with his Chinese counterpart before and after the 2020 election, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa said on “Good Morning America” Monday.
“He was not going rogue,” Costa told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an exclusive interview. “He was reading people in throughout the national security community, trying to contain a situation and a president he believed was in serious mental decline.”
According to their new book “Peril,” which chronicles the end of the Trump administration, Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Chinese Gen. Li Zuocheng in October 2020 and January 2021 to dispel Chinese fears that Trump was planning a secret attack and to assure him the U.S. was not on the verge of collapse after the Capitol riot.
“If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise,” Milley said on the October call, according to the book.
While Trump and Republicans accused Milley of treason and called on President Joe Biden to fire him amid reports of his phone calls, Costa told Stephanopoulos that Milley was “reading people in” on his conversations, suggesting that their reporting in the book was being misconstrued.
Even though the calls “were held on a top secret back channel, they were not secret,” Costa said. “This was not someone who was working in isolation.”
Added Woodward: “Two days after the insurrection at the Capitol was a moment of maximum tension.”
Speaking to The Associated Press last week in Greece, Milley said the calls were “routine” and done “to reassure both allies and adversaries in this case in order to ensure strategic stability.”
He said he was prepared to defend his actions in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee next week.
The new book, which goes on sale Sep. 21, also details how former Vice President Mike Pence grappled with his duties to certify the election results on Jan. 6, as Trump repeatedly pressured him to overturn Biden’s victory.
Pence consulted the Senate parliamentarian and former Vice President Dan Quayle on how to approach his ceremonial role presiding over the electoral vote count.
“You don’t know the position I’m in,” Pence told Quayle.
“I do know the position you’re in,” Quayle replied, according to the book. “I also know what the law is. You listen to the parliamentarian. That’s all you do. You have no power.”
Pence, who is eyeing a 2024 White House bid, was “trying to ride both horses,” Woodward said. He was trying to “do his constitutional duty but also keep the avenues to Trump open,” Woodward added.
Woodward and Costa conducted more than 200 deep background interviews with witnesses or firsthand participants in events described in the book.
(NEW YORK) — The White House on Monday announced a new international air travel system starting in early November, requiring all foreign nationals traveling to the United States to be fully vaccinated and show proof of vaccination before boarding a U.S. bound plane — ending the separation of some families since March 2020.
The new system, along with the vaccine requirement, would include stepped up testing, contact tracing and masking, officials said.
For fully vaccinated international travelers, the 14-day quarantine would go away. The specific vaccines that qualify a traveler as “fully vaccinated” will be determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator.
”This new system allows us to implement strict protocols to prevent the spread of COVID from passengers flying internationally into the United States or requiring adult foreign nationals traveling to the United States to be fully vaccinated. It’s based on public health. It requires fully vaccinated individuals. And so this is based on individuals rather than a country-based approach, so is a strong system,” Zients said.
The announcement came as President Joe Biden prepared to head to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Monday and a day before he was to meet at the White House with U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
